Intel Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge CPU Review - PAGE 10

3DMark 11:

Futuremark's latest 3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new DirectX 11 features including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

3DMark 11 is a 3D rendering program that relies mainly on the power of the graphics card. This being the case, we are gauging the total performance of the processor based on the difference in the stock and overclocked results to see if any bottleneck is occurring. As you can see from the graph, there was a decent performance increase at the lowest setting, so overclocking will improve the total frame rate at least when it comes to running DX 11 games at low settings. However, as the resolution is increased, the difference becomes marginal at best.

Lost Planet:

Settings: Resolution at 800x600 with lowest in-game settings

The results in the Lost Planet benchmark were interesting, as the two scenes in the game gave us entirely different results once we overclocked the CPU. The reason being the snow scene is a large environment with only a few creatures, so here it is the graphics card doing all the work, while the cave scene has actions executed by the CPU, hence the large increase in performance in the cave scene and not the snow.

One of the great things about Intel’s “Tick, Tock” release cadence is that it gives us all an early glimpse into the company’s future plans and potential product offerings, especially since they’ve been able to execute so well over the last few years. Seeing Conroe eventually evolve into Penryn, and Nehalem into Westmere has given us all an idea as to what to expect with today’s official launch of Ivy Bridge, the “Tick” to Sandy Bridge’s “Tock”, otherwise known as Intel’s 3rd Generation Core Processor family. Of course, if you haven’t stayed on top of Intel’s plans since announcing their “Tick, Tock” model, you could have just read the myriad of leaks that have plagued this launch, but that’s a discussion for another day. Today is all about Ivy Bridge and its official launch in both desktop and mobile flavors.